I installed NextCloudPi a couple of days ago and I’m absolutely amazed. Before finding out it existed, I was close to giving up on the idea of a home hosted personal cloud. But NextCloudPi brings the admin effort down by so much and makes it doable for me in the couple of hours I’ve got left to figure out this stuff. For that I want to say: Thank you!
So, I’m trying to make my cloud better one step at a time and this is my question: I’ve read at so many places that it is encouraged to use an external flash drive as main data folder. But I’ve never understood why. Wouldn’t it be easier and more robust to store the data on the internal microSD card of the Raspberry Pi and use a USB drive for backup only? But maybe there is a good reason why storing the data externally is better and if so, I’m happy to learn about it and improve my setup. I saw that I could move the data quite easily.
There is no reason to use either a micro sd or usb drive, other than you have one on hand. Neither is recommended at all. Use them as you wish.
I’ve tried this. Both are absolute garbage as storage media and are painfully slow. A quick internet search will help you.
Yes, anything will be better than microsd cards or usb thumb drives.
For longevity and speed you’ll want to spend $$ for an SSD connected over USB 3.0 on a Raspberry Pi 4. It isn’t great, but at least you’ll be moving along in decent fashion.
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